They think it's all over. It is now.

That's it.  Done and dusted.  This time tomorrow I will hopefully be sat at home in Essex, the sunny climbs of Spain far behind me.  My year abroad began 350 days ago when I set off for Valencia in July 2011, it seems like such a long time ago and yet only yesterday...  Since then I have spent around 300 of those days out of the UK, the rest have been split between Belgium and Spain (with a couple of weekends in France and Luxembourg!)  I don't think it will really hit me that it's all over for a while yet, although I'm going home tomorrow I am heading up to Lancaster on Sunday for a week and at the moment I think it will just feel like another one of my visits, not that I'm actually back for good.  I guess it will hit me at some point in the summer when I'm stuck in the rain that I won't actually be coming back out to Spain just yet.

If you'd have asked me a few months ago if I could see myself moving abroad I'd have said no, I think that was because I'd been in Brussels, in winter, speaking my weaker language.  Ask me that question now and I'd have something different to say.  Hard as I have found it this year I think a lot of that can be put down to things not being on my terms, studying classes I wasn't enjoying and finding little motivation for them.  If the right job came along one day then I would certainly consider coming back to live in Spain again, and I'm surprised to "hear" myself say that.

Contrary to what many people will probably believe I have actually enjoyed this year, in my own way, and I've still got something out of it.  I may not have made loads of friends from all around the world and had "the best year of my life" but that's not to say that there isn't a lot of value in the year that I have had.  I have learnt plenty about myself, and I think I've learnt a fair amount about other people too.

Tomorrow afternoon I will return to the UK satisfied with my year, I'm not going to let myself have any regrets or things I wish I'd done differently, because let's face it, who is that helping now?

As for what's next?  Who knows!  I thought that by the end of this year I'd have a clearer picture of what I want to do with myself this time next year when I'm all done at Lancaster (This year better not pass as quickly as the last one has...).  However, I've probably just ended up with more ideas and confusion!  Oh well, nice to have options right?

I reckon that once I'm back in rainy old England I'll realise how much I liked being abroad and probably want to get out and see more of the world, let's just see though shall we?

I'm hoping to keep writing these blogs, although my life back home probably won't be interesting enough to write about unless you want to hear about my dissertation, going to work and writing essays, so I'll try and do them on languages/translation sort of topics as and when I can think of any.

So, that's it.  My year abroad is over. Thanks to those of you that have been reading this all the way along, and I hope I've been of some use/interest/entertainment to at least some of you!

The things I'll miss, and what I'm looking forward to at home.

This is in no particular order, it's just getting written down as things come to the front of my mind, so, here goes:

Won't miss having to use adaptor plugs every time I want to plug something in.

Will miss the lovely blue sky that is a pretty permanent fixture here.

Won't miss having to put sun cream on all the time.

Will miss the fact that it is always sunny enough to require sun cream!

Won't miss the disorganisation of the Uni here in Granada.

Will miss free tapas!  Whoever thought of that is a genius and paying to just receive a drink will never feel right again.

Won't miss studying courses that I don't enjoy and have little motivation to do well in.

Looking forward to: Roast dinner, cups of tea, not having to rely on skype/email to talk to people, getting back to work (I'll regret saying that...)

There are more things I wanted to put on this list but I'm drawing blanks at the second, might edit this later when I remember them!

The penultimate week of my Year Abroad and my final visitor.

This time next week I will be back in the UK, after having a touristy week of being able to fully enjoy Granada I have realised how much I really like it here.  If I could just relocate my family, friends, Uni and job to Spain I'd love to stay longer, I can see myself coming back to Spain in the future, got to go and finish off that degree first!


On Sunday I headed off to Malaga to meet Henry at the airport, before that though I decided to have a wander round, I'd have liked to have a bit more time as I just about had enough time to get down to the port, have a drink and then walk back to the bus station so I didn't really get to see that much.  We didn't get back to Granada until later in the evening so we went for dinner and then headed back to the flat.  I didn't have any particular plans for Monday so we spent it wandering round, the day was basically a series of moments sat in bars or cafes drinking and eating interspersed with walking round.  It was a lovely day so we walked up towards the Albyzin, on the way up I realised there was a part of Granada that I'd still not taken a lot at myself, the Sacremonte so we had a good wander round there too.  The views out over the Alhambra were brilliant!

After this we continued walking up the hill to Mirador de San Nicolas to enjoy the view and one of the best smoothies I've ever drunk.  The intention was to then walk to another view point but the map reading let us down and we never actually made it there!  

On Tuesday we went to the Alhambra, this was the second time I've been but I missed out a chunk the first time so it was good to get to go again.  Also, the first time I went it was raining and Tuesday was a lovely blue-skied day.

Wednesday was beach day so we headed off to Salobreña in the morning and stayed on the beach all day.  I, the ginger, got a little burnt on my back and on the tops of my legs but otherwise left the beach undamaged.  Someone however left resembling a lobster and has suffered the consequences of it since...  I had an exam on Thursday evening so I took my revision along with me.

We didn't do much on Thursday but I did go along to my penultimate exam and it wasn't too bad.  Very early start on Friday as Henrys bus left Granada at 7am...


Back to reality now and getting on with my revision for my final exam on Tuesday.  I doubt I'm going to have much left to blog about now as I'll just be revising, reading in the sun, cleaning, washing and packing over the next 6 days.  I'll probably write some sort of summary to the year on Thursday once I'm all packed up and ready to go!

Granada gets in the festival spirit.

This week is the main festival week here in Granada, it was the religious festival of Corpus Christi during the week and the people of Granada decided to take this day and build their whole festival week around it.  This means that there are things going on in town all week and there is a festival site set up on the edge of town.  I've not been over there but I imagine it is very much like the one I saw in Seville, lots of tents, people dancing, dressed in traditional clothing and I'm pretty sure there is also a fair ground.

On Wednesday I went and saw the first of two parades, this one was called La Tarasca and was all about this lady and her dragon:

It was aimed at kids so there were lots of people dressed up with big heads and there was even a pirate ship, although I'm not sure quite what purpose that served!

The main Corpus Christi parade was on Thursday, in typical Spanish style it started a fair bit later than it was meant to but that give me a chance to have a wander round and see what else was going on.  On Plaza Bib Rambla there were a collection of cartoon pictures that were generally all about Granada and things that had happened in the year.  My favourite one was a picture of a lady slipping over on the pavements down one of the main streets, we've said before that we'd hate to walk down them in the rain!

Eventually the parade got under-way, it started with parts of the parade from the previous day along with a group of women dressed in traditional flamenco clothing and playing castanets.  There was also a small group of men that were playing guitars and some horses.

These were then followed by what seemed like hundreds of people carrying candles.  I presume they were representatives from each of the churches as there were so many of them.  Eventually I got a little bored of this and decided to walk the route in reverse in the hopes of either finding the end of the parade or something else happening.  This was a good move as I came across groups of people in all sorts of different uniforms representing the military and the police etc followed by the main float at the end.

At the end there was also a band playing, I can't even begin to imagine playing in that heat, especially the guys that passed me that were playing tubas and baritone saxes, they're enough effort to play when walking without the 32 degree heat! 

Other than that I haven't been up to anything blog worthy recently, it's just been exams and revision.  Got a friend arriving tomorrow until Friday so I'll be doing the touristy things again, got our Alhambra tickets booked and I'm glad to go again because it seems I missed a part where you climb a tower and get a really good view of the city, how I missed that I'll never know!  Also got a trip to the beach planned, got to try and top up the tan (or get one....) before I leave in less than 2 weeks!

Year abroad choices, the ones I made and what I'd do differently. My summary of studying in Brussels and Granada.

Having come to the end of my classes once and for all here in Granada and so being just a matter of weeks from the end of my YA once and for allI think I am now in a good position to be able to write this blog about studying on the year abroad.  The study/work placement/language assistant debate is one that every languages student goes through when making their plans for the year abroad, and everyone has their own reasons for the decisions they make.  I personally didn't want to be a language assistant as I really wanted to split my year between the two countries without having to spend my summers away if I didn't want to.  Also, as a French intensive student my French tutor advised me that teaching would not be the best way to improve my French and strongly recommended that I studied.  I think she was right with her suggestion as the language assistants spend most of their time in school pretending they only speak English, meaning they have to find other ways of getting out and practising, which of course is fine for some people, but for those like me that as I said on a previous blog seem to have regressed into their shells somewhat this year it probably isn't ideal.  The other choice was to find a work placement, but I decided I didn't want to do this and was told repeatedly that placements in both countries would be very hard to come across anyway.  So the decision was made that I would study.

When it comes to French we had Brussels, Geneva, Lyon, Rennes, Poitiers or Montpellier, the first two are specialist translation schools which appealed to me and so I opted for Brussels.  Let's talk about that decision first, the main thing I'd not really considered when it came to Brussels was how international it is.  I'd considered the bilingualism with Dutch but did my research and found that French was the dominant language in the city anyway. What I guess hadn't occurred to me was that with the presence of so many international organisations everyone spoke English, it didn't matter if you spoke to them in French because 7 times out of 10 they'd reply to you in English, usually thinking they were being helpful not knowing they were being quite the opposite.  The other thing with ISTI was that because of the size of the school in comparison to the amount of Erasmus students they took on I found that I was in a lot of classes with just Erasmus students and it was very hard to integrate with the Belgian students and get any language practise.  I signed up for a tandem programme and met up once a week with a Belgian girl where we would speak for the first half in French and then in English, but in honesty this probably was no where near enough.

As far as Lancaster is concerned we don't have a huge amount of choice when it comes to where we can study for Spanish.  We can go to Mexico, Bilbao, Granada, Girona and Lleida.  So, that leaves you with the choice of going thousands of miles away, to two Catalan speaking Unis, to the Basque country where you may be faced with a second language as well or Granada.  I toyed with the idea of Bilbao but settled on Granada in the end.  My concern about Granada was that it is known as a really big party city because of the amount of Erasmus students and that isn't really my thing, but this hasn't really been a problem, I've found it's been easy enough just to do what I want instead.  Although there are lots of Erasmus students in Granada there is also a huge amount of Spanish students so I wasn't ever in classes with just foreign students.  You do however have a totally free choice of what you take and there isn't really any guidance on what is too hard for Erasmus students so I have found that two of the courses I've taken haven't really been suitable and I'm sure that is going to show in my exam results- it's a good job that they don't really matter!

Studying does have its pros and cons.  The good thing is that even if you're not speaking the language as much as you'd like you are hearing it, taking classes in it and writing in it all the time which has to be good practise.  It also keeps you busy, for me I need to keep doing things so I don't feel too homesick, so having a good amount of contact hours and work to do outside of that time kept me going and it wouldn't if I'd been teaching for instance.  The cons obviously are having to take exams, not really knowing what courses to take and the difficulty of integrating with native speakers.  It is also worth considering your unis rules on exams, as far as Lancaster is concerned we have to take them and the marks count towards our grade for the year, but we don't have to pass them, this works in two ways.  It is first and foremost a really good thing because there is no need to panic and stress about the exams, what happens, happens!  The problem with this is that my motivation to revise is pretty scarce so I find myself half heartedly revising and just wishing away the hours until they are over, possibly not the way I should be spending my final weeks here, but that's how it is!

Sometimes I do wish I'd worked, it would have given me a different experience for the year and I might have felt like I'd achieved more, but the issue with that for me is that I'd potentially be totally alone and unsure of how to meet people, especially other students because it is important to have that sort of "homely" contact from time to time.  I did however work for 6 weeks last summer in Valencia, I met all sorts of people and really enjoyed myself, but the work was boring because there just wasn't much of it so I spent a lot of time doing nothing.  That's the hard thing about picking what to do and where to go, unless you know someone that has done the exact same thing before it is all very much unknown.  I couldn't have spent the whole year, or even 6 months in that job, but it was good for the summer and to give me an experience of working in Spain.

So what am I concluding?  I'm not really sure if I'm honest with you.  Hindsight is a wonderful thing isn't it?  And maybe with it I'd have seriously looked into finding work placements that interested me and would be relevant to what I want to do in the future, but this time last year I didn't know that, and we had to make decisions in the November before we left!  For any future YA students reading this, it is important to remember that YA decisions are all about you, don't feel influenced by what other people are doing, and why they are making that decision, because they're not you!